"Sure, I know. You don't have to patronize me. It's just that—well, who is this particular lunatic anyway? We don't know any more about him than the day he was caught. Even the name we had to make up. Who is he, where'd he come from, what's his home?"
My home ... a world of eternities, an eternity of worlds.... I must destroy, hurt, kill before I wake always ... and then once more I must sleep ... always, always....
"Look, there's a hundred vagrants in every city. Just like our boy: no name, no friends, no relatives."
"Then he doesn't seem in the least odd to you, is that it? Is that what you're telling me?"
"So he's odd! I never met a murderer that wasn't!" Ritchie recalled the lean hairless face, the expressionless eyes, the slender youthful body that moved in strange hesitant jerks, the halting voice.
The clock bonged the quarter hour. Fifteen to twelve. Max Kaplan wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
"And besides," Ritchie said, somewhat too loudly, "it's plain ridiculous. He says—what? We're a dream he's having, right? Okay—then what about our parents, and their parents, everybody who never heard of the kid?"
"First thing I thought of. And you know his answer."
Ritchie snorted.